If you ever feel anxious before an important job interview, Google wants to help you with its new Interview Warmup tool.
Interview Warmup - opens in a new tab - helps you prepare for a job interview by asking a series of questions chosen by "industry experts" to simulate real-life scenarios. From there, an AI will review your responses, noting patterns and talking points in your response.
The idea is that you take these comments and refine your responses by focusing on these terms. For example, suppose the Interview Warmup asks you about a difficult time you experienced at work. Judging by your response, the tool may recommend that you focus on the "lessons learned" from this situation and the "results". Its goal is to guide people in creating a detailed answer.
According to Google, Interview Warmup will not grade your answers, but instead will be a non-judgmental space to help people practice.
Google says Interview Warmup was created specifically for its Google Career Certificate program (opens in a new tab), an e-learning program that teaches people tech-related skills. Despite the experience of its graduates, the company found that people had a hard time getting a job if they didn't have someone to advocate for them or if they didn't have a good way to prepare for an interview. . This tool is intended as a way to help graduates formulate good answers to interview questions.
Interview Warmup focuses on the technology industry with jobs like IT support and data analysis. It is a free tool that also covers questions outside of the career certificate program. We asked Google if it plans to expand the service beyond technology and have practice scenarios for other industries like fashion, but the company didn't respond.
The interview warmup is still in its early stages, and Google is asking users for feedback on how to improve it. You can try the tool now (opens in a new tab) where you can save your answer or write it down. Most of the jobs are related to technology, but you can ask more general questions.
For example, you might choose IT support as your job. You will answer five questions such as "why would you be a good fit for the job?" or something more technical like "how would I avoid a security attack?"
Once this is done, your answers will be analyzed according to three categories of information: work-related terms, most used words and talking points. The AI will highlight the words and phrases that belong to these categories. If no job-related phrases are found, the interview warm-up gives you a list of terms to help you refine your answer.
If you like your answers, you can save them or try again with new or the same questions. The AI can be a bit weird. A recording can come back full of grammatical errors or leave things out.
With that said, Interview Warmup is a great tool and can help you land that coveted job. And if you're looking for a new career, TechRadar has a list of the best job boards on the internet (opens in a new tab).